Derek and I both worked on the Pentium 4 6xx article that went up today, so you know it's just got that extra bit of love that you all come here for :)
Overall I was relatively disappointed with the Pentium 4 600 series (and definitely in the new Extreme Edition processor). A larger, higher latency L2 cache is not the way to go - especially when looking at microprocessors from a performance per transistor added perspective. I'll be talking a lot about performance per transistor as a metric in my Cell article, which got put on hold while I worked on the 600 series article, but I will resume my focus on that today.
Looking at the amount of additional die area that the extra 1MB of cache consumes and compare that to the less than 10% of the die that AMD's on-die memory controller occupies and it's quickly obvious which offers the greater performance benefit per transistor.
It's very clear that, internally, Intel is facing a struggle between fighting for performance and fighting for dollars. Because while each revision or clock bump to Prescott does nothing to outclass or outperform AMD, Intel continues to do extremely well business wise. Convincing management to look at the AMD threat more seriously is difficult when what you're doing is making money, a lot more than AMD is making. I don't get the impression that Intel is going to be any more attractive even by the end of this year, although it does look like they will be first to dual core desktops, which is a sign of taking the AMD threat a little more seriously.
Overall I was relatively disappointed with the Pentium 4 600 series (and definitely in the new Extreme Edition processor). A larger, higher latency L2 cache is not the way to go - especially when looking at microprocessors from a performance per transistor added perspective. I'll be talking a lot about performance per transistor as a metric in my Cell article, which got put on hold while I worked on the 600 series article, but I will resume my focus on that today.
Looking at the amount of additional die area that the extra 1MB of cache consumes and compare that to the less than 10% of the die that AMD's on-die memory controller occupies and it's quickly obvious which offers the greater performance benefit per transistor.
It's very clear that, internally, Intel is facing a struggle between fighting for performance and fighting for dollars. Because while each revision or clock bump to Prescott does nothing to outclass or outperform AMD, Intel continues to do extremely well business wise. Convincing management to look at the AMD threat more seriously is difficult when what you're doing is making money, a lot more than AMD is making. I don't get the impression that Intel is going to be any more attractive even by the end of this year, although it does look like they will be first to dual core desktops, which is a sign of taking the AMD threat a little more seriously.
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crtfanboy - Monday, February 21, 2005 - link
What's up with the "AnandTech Deals" price finder looking up P3 600mhz's? More importantly, why are they still $100?Andy Bellenie - Monday, February 21, 2005 - link
I still can't fathom why Intel is having such trouble getting more performance out of it's chips. The last few releases have an air of desperation about them, with all sorts of ultimately unrewarding 'features' being applied to compensate for the lack of GHz. Hurry up dual core!